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We offer a new perspective on the low-beta anomaly by acknowledging the omitted-variable problem in the correlation component of beta: Correlation is “plagued” by firm size (the omitted variable) to exhibit a negative price. Once isolating the size impact, a hidden positive price emerges for the size-orthogonalized component of correlation. Further analyses suggest that i). The positive price of the size-orthogonalized component is not due to mispricing, supporting the return comovement-based pricing channel. ii). The negative price of the size-explained component is related to illiquidity and coskewness. iii). The omitted-variable problem also applies to the pricing of beta.

This paper studies the impact of the Brexit process in the main global financial markets by investigating the effect of financial contagion between series of stock index returns. The importance of the United Kingdom, not only at the European level but also at the international level, is the main reason for developing this analysis. We study the response on global financial markets to the Brexit process during the period that covers January 1, 2016 to November 30, 2018. We apply joint tests of contagion where the contagion channels are the conditional correlation, the coskewness and the covolatility between the United Kingdom as a source of contagion and the remaining recipient markets. Our results reveal financial contagion on the main European and international economies consistent with the effect of the Brexit referendum results and the subsequent increasing uncertainty.

This paper shows that low‐risk anomalies in the capital asset pricing model and in traditional factor models arise when investors require compensation for coskewness risk. Empirically, we find that option‐implied ex ante skewness is strongly related to ex post residual coskewness, which allows us to construct coskewness factor‐mimicking portfolios. Controlling for skewness renders the alphas of betting‐against‐beta and betting‐against‐volatility insignificant. We also show that the returns of beta‐ and volatility‐sorted portfolios are driven largely by a single principal component, which in turn is explained largely by skewness.

Bond skewness and coskewness (i.e., bond return comovement with market volatility) are both time varying, with cross-sectional variation driven by maturity and credit rating. Other things being equal, longer maturity bonds have lower skewness, and lower coskewness with respect to the bond market index; lower quality bonds have lower skewness, and higher coskewness with respect to the bond market index. Three-moment bond alphas (which account for coskewness effects) are time varying and predictable by market default spread. They are significantly different from, and often are closer to zero than, two-moment alphas (which ignore coskewness effects).

This study examines the cross-sectional variation of futures returns from different asset classes. The monthly returns are positively correlated with downside risk and negatively correlated with coskewness. The asymmetric volatility effect generates negatively skewed returns. Assets with high coskewness and low downside betas provide hedges against market downside risk and offer low returns. The high returns offered by assets with low coskewness and high downside betas are a risk premium for bearing downside risk. The asset pricing model that incorporates downside risk partially explains the futures returns. The results indicate a unified risk perspective to jointly price different asset classes.

This study presents an improved model for estimating life insurer cost of capital with the inclusion of upside and downside risk factors and controlling for life insurer characteristics. Although various asymmetric measures of market risk have been shown to be priced factors for the broader equity market, life insurer realized equity returns include a much larger premium for bearing downside risk, even after controlling for firm characteristics and other measures of risk. Cross-sectional regression analysis finds a positive (negative) premium for downside (upside) betas, conditional on down and up markets, respectively. Coskewness and cokurtosis are also priced factors.

We investigate the relationship between ex ante total skewness and holding returns on individual equity options. Recent theoretical developments predict a negative relationship between total skewness and average returns, in contrast to the traditional view that only coskewness is priced. We find, consistent with recent theory, that total skewness exhibits a strong negative relationship with average option returns. Differences in average returns for option portfolios sorted on ex ante skewness range from 10% to 50% per week, even after controlling for risk. Our findings suggest that these large premiums compensate intermediaries for bearing unhedgeable risk when accommodating investor demand for lottery-like options.

The Margrabe formula is used extensively by theorists and practitioners not only on exchange options, but also on executive compensation schemes, real options, weather and commodity derivatives, etc. However, the crucial assumption of a bivariate normal distribution is not fully satisfied in almost all applications. The impact of nonnormality on exchange options is studied by using a bivariate Gram-Charlier approximation. For near-the-money exchange options, skewness and coskewness induce price corrections which are linear in moneyness, while kurtosis and cokurtosis induce quadratic price corrections. The nonnormality helps to explain the implied correlation smile observed in practice.

We present hedge fund performance estimates that adjust for stale prices, Fama-French risk factors and skewness. We contrast these new performance estimates with traditional performance measures. Using three-factor models to adjust for staleness in prices and to incorporate Fama-French factors along with the Harvey-Siddique (2000) two-factor model that incorporates skewness, we find that for the period 1990–2003, all hedge fund categories achieve above average performance when measured against an aggregate market index. More significantly, however, when we estimate performance at the individual hedge fund level, we discover that only 40 to 47% of the funds are shown to achieve an above average performance over that time period depending on the model used. These results have important implications for investors, endowments and pensions when they choose hedge fund managers.

In this paper we examine the variables that explain the cross-section of UK stock returns. Previous studies have found that the CAPM beta has moderate or even insignificant explanatory power once the Fama French factors are included. However, we control for different realised risk premia in up and down markets by using the same methodology as Pettengill, Sundaram and Mathur (1995). Unlike previous work, we find that beta is highly significant in explaining the cross-section of UK stock returns and more importantly remains significant even when the Fama French factors are included in the cross-sectional regressions. We also investigate whether higher co-moments (co-skewness and co-kurtosis) have any explanatory power but find that empirical support is weaker.

Heteroskedasticity biases tests for contagion based on correlation coefficients. When contagion is defined as a significant increase in market comovement after a shock to one country, previous work suggests contagion occurred during recent crises. This paper shows that correlation coefficients are conditional on market volatility. Under certain assumptions, it is possible to adjust for this bias. Using this adjustment, there was virtually no increase in unconditional correlation coefficients (i.e., no contagion) during the 1997 Asian crisis, 1994 Mexican devaluation, and 1987 U.S. market crash. There is a high level of market comovement in all periods, however, which we call interdependence.

Spot power prices are volatile and since electricity cannot be economically stored, familiar arbitrage-based methods are not applicable for pricing power derivative contracts. This paper presents an equilibrium model implying that the forward power price is a downward biased predictor of the future spot price if expected power demand is low and demand risk is moderate. However, the equilibrium forward premium increases when either expected demand or demand variance is high, because of positive skewness in the spot power price distribution. Preliminary empirical evidence indicates that the premium in forward power prices is greatest during the summer months. WHOLESALE POWER MARKETS, where producers trade electricity among themselves and with power-marketing and power-distribution companies, have grown rapidly in recent years. 1 The U.S. Department of Energy ~2000! reports that U.S. wholesale power transactions during 1999 amounted to approximately 2.6 billion megawatt hours ~MWh!, or about $85 billion. The U.S. wholesale power market is soon likely to comprise the world’s largest commodity market. Electricity as a commodity has many interesting characteristics, most of which stem from the fact that it cannot be economically stored. 2 Market

This paper investigates nonlinear pricing kernels in which the risk factor is endogenously determined and preferences restrict the definition of the pricing kernel. These kernels potentially generate the empirical performance of nonlinear and multifactor models, while maintaining empirical power and avoiding ad hoc specifications of factors or functional form. Our test results indicate that preferencerestricted nonlinear pricing kernels are both admissible for the cross section of returns and are able to significantly improve upon linear single- and multifactor kernels. Further, the nonlinearities in the pricing kernel drive out the importance of the factors in the linear multi-factor model.

If asset returns have systematic skewness, expected returns should include rewards for accepting this risk. We formalize this intuition with an asset pricing model that incorporates conditional skewness. Our results show that conditional skewness helps explain the cross-sectional variation of expected returns across assets and is significant even when factors based on size and book-to-market are included. Systematic skewness is economically important and commands a risk premium, on average, of 3.60 percent per year. Our results suggest that the momentum effect is related to systematic skewness. The low expected return momentum portfolios have higher skewness than high expected return portfolios.

EMPIRICAL AND THEORETICAL ATTACKS on the Markowitz mean-variance, portfolio theory have given impetus to the investigation of moments of higher order than the variance. Denoting w as an investor's wealth, and i his incomes (a random variable), if the investors utility function, U, is solely dependent on the sum of his wealth and income we can define his utility as U = U(i + w). The investor's rate of return on investment of w is defined as f = i/w and his utility may be given by U = U(rw + w). Letting jt = E(w + rw), representing the expected value on investment, expanding U in the familiar Taylor series, and taking the expected value of both sides gives

The coskewness and dividend yield effects on capital asset prices have been established in two separate literatures. Neither literature controls for the variable in the other, nor for other potentially confounding factors such as size of the firm and the January effect on returns. Using stock return data for 1969–1978, this study provides evidence of coskewness, size, yield and January effects on stock returns. Coskewness appears to be a surrogate variable for dividend yield. When yield is controlled for, the coskewness effect cannot be detected. Hence, the significance of coskewness seems to result from the presence of the uncontrolled factor, dividend yield.

VIRTUALLY ALL OF THE early studies of the Sharpe-Lintner capital asset pricing model (CAPM) found the predicted linear relationship between return and the non-diversifiable risk of risky assets, generally represented by common stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). However, they also found that this return-risk relationship seemed to imply for most periods a riskless market rate of return substantially above any reasonable measure of the actual risk-free rates of return. Recent papers point to a similar result if the market portfolio of risky assets is represented by an appropriately weighted portfolio of common stocks and bonds instead of common stocks alone.1 Thus, it is noteworthy that a study by Kraus and Litzenberger finds that a measure6 of co-skewness can be used as a supplement to the co-variance measure of risk to explain the returns on individual NYSE stocks, and in the process to explain the otherwise observed discrepancies between these returns and the returns on NYSE stocks as a whole.2 In other words, they extend capital asset pricing theory to incorporate the effect of skewness in return distributions, making the assumption that investors have a preference for positive return skewness in their portfolios (and therefore positive or negative co-skewness in individual assets depending on the skewness in the market portfolio).3 As a consequence Kraus and Litzenberger are apparently able to explain observed returns in the stock market without the substitution of a non-observable zerobeta construct for the risk-free rate. Kraus and Litzenberger assume that just as investors are averse to variance in their portfolios, and therefore beta in individual assets, they prefer positive skewness in their portfolios. Hence, since they also assume that all investors hold the market portfolio, investors would be willing to pay a premium for assets which possess positive co-skewness with the market if

In this paper, the authors employ a nonlinear formulation to examine empirically the structural content of the three moment capital asset pricing model (CAPM). Whereas previous research focused on the coefficients of beta and co-skewness, this paper presents empirical results on the market risk premium and elasticity coefficient components of these two coefficients. The results indicate that although the estimated coefficient of coskewness gives important information on the marginal rate of substitution between skewness and expected return, the elasticity coefficient can provide additional (albeit different) information on skewness preference that is independent of the effects of the market risk premium. This research also shows how the non-linear formulation provides a direct linkage between the twomoment and three-moment CAPM versions and thus provides an empirical test of the theoretical conditions under which skewness preference is consistent with the two-moment CAPM empiricial results.